South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications

A system overhaul

Application Development

GQI Course & Full Suite Package

ReEngine was brought in to provide our full suite of services for South Dakota's software development organization (BIT). In doing so, the BIT team members become process improvement professionals and boosted the quality and velocity of their development projects.

Following the training, ReEngine spent the next 6 months completing 3 projects with the BIT Development team. In each of the three projects, BIT staff took an increasingly leadership-based role in the project. By the end of the third project, BIT had a pool of staff members that ReEngine certified had been both fully trained in GQI and had obtained sufficient experience in the GQI methodology to be able to implement similar projects on their own.

BIT successfully invested in enhancing a portion of their own organization to become process improvement professionals, allowing their performance to continue to grow over time. The three projects that BIT chose to work with ReEngine all pertained to the quality and velocity of their development projects.

The first project was to create a Journey Board. In doing so, BIT was able to identify their annual and bi-weekly objectives in completing projects. Having identified their bi-weekly objectives for each team, bi-weekly planning meetings were then established to make sure that each Manager had planned for the coming weeks and identified why any objectives were missed during the previous weeks. The Board helps plan the teams’ work, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and ensures that leadership objectives can be achieved.

The second project focused on a particular part of the development process wherein BIT gathered the needs of their agency customers. By improving and standardizing the process, the keystone element of the BIT-Development process can be ensured to achieve the highest levels of efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction.

The third and final project was to help guide sharing staff members between development teams. Previously, the practice of sharing team members between development teams to add skill-sets or merely add "oomph" to a project was done very informally, if at all. Managers feared that if they shared some of their most skilled team members, they would be poached by other managers or that their own productivity would suffer. ReEngine mentored BIT-Development staff as they constructed a process by which these developers and analysts could be shared between teams to enhance their productivity at key times without impacting the output of their "home team" or fear of losing them permanently. BIT-Development can now provide superior services to client agencies without having to search for outside contractors or new hires, meaning lower costs for services for citizens of South Dakota.

At the end of the engagement, BIT-Development was on course to increase the velocity of their development projects by 53% over their 7 year average. During the 6 month engagement with ReEngine, staff closed 400+ development projects, compared to an annual average of ~600.